Whether Fusion Garage is a fraudulent entity or not is something the courts will have to decide. Nevertheless, they have now proved that they are at the very least dumber than dirt.

Apparently, Fusion Garage wanted to gather feedback from their entire customer base. So, they fired off the following mail to their customers:

Dear Sir and Madam,
Thank you for supporting JooJoo.
We hope to get your feedback about the JooJoo Tablet.
Please revert back to us want you think of our product.
Please drop us a line on how your JooJoo is working.

Thank you.

JooJooSupportTeam

The trouble is that not only did their customer relations guy not know how to use a spell checker, but he was also oblivious to the purpose of the Bcc (Blind Carbon Copy) field. You can very well guess what happened next.

JooJoo Support dispatched the email using the CC field and in the process revealed the e-mail id of its entire user base.

As if this guffaw alone wasn’t embarrassing enough, it also revealed that Fusion Garage has managed to sell a grand total of 64 units. Yes, JooJoo has managed to do the seemingly impossible. It is faring even poorer than the rock bottom market expectations.

Update: Fusion Garage has denied that this e-mail represents their entire customer base. Apparently, this mail was intended for only a select group of customers. See the comments section for more information.

This is Ubuntu’s week in FOSS and it is to stay this way till the launch of Ubuntu. Canonical has recently faced some problem relating to its flagship product Ubuntu which includes the next version. The version 10.04 of Ubuntu is around the corner and Ubuntu fans all over the world are gearing up for it.

News

Ubuntu 10.04 RC Release

Canonical has just released the RC of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. This marks the release candidate indicating that the product is due in time. Ubuntu 10.04 RC has all the final features that the final version of Ubuntu 10.04 will have. Want to download the RC? Get it here.

Memory Leak in X.Org on Ubuntu

This memory leak has resulted from a patch which was released to prevent GLX 1.4 crashes. Developers are unable to fix this and the GLX will possibly be rolled back to version 1.2. This problem is being considered urgent and is the top priority at Canonical right now. Read more at this post on Techie Buzz.

How To

How to get a free Ubuntu 10.04 CD if you are from UK

Ubuntu shipit is open but apparently, it is not shipping out any CDs currently. Although, there is an alternative way to get free Ubuntu CDs if you are in the UK. OS Disks is giving out free Ubuntu CDs at their shop. Simply go to this page and order a free CD. It looks like a shopping portal but the CD is free to buy. Unfortunately, it works only for people in the UK. Read more at OmgUbuntu!.

We are nearing the Ubuntu release and will do a full coverage of its release, download and features. Stay tuned.

Twitter has made it’s latest acquisition this Friday. It goes by the name of Cloudhopper and is an SMS service that connects to Twitter. The two founders of Cloudhopper, who were working in partnership with Twitter will now join it full time. This is a part of the expansion plans Twitter has probably decided on after Chirp’s success.

Cloudhopper is described on the homppage as,

Cloudhopper provides mobile messaging technology and expertise to businesses in the wireless space. Currently, Cloudhopper powers some of the largest and most successful mobile messaging (SMS and MMS) campaigns in North America, Europe, and Africa.

This provides new ventures for Twitter’s expansion plan. Twitter has been popular on networks with data access but that is not the situation in most countries. This move will help Twitter expand into markets where mobile voice networks have emerged without giving much thought about data communication.

Twitter acquired Tweetie a few days ago and is also planning to create official apps for all mobile platforms. Twitter is surely looking forward to an expansion into the mobile sector. It also claims that the number of tweets sent over SMS is on a constant rise and the aquisition of Cloudhopper has made it easier for Twitter to provide its services in some specific areas regionally. Thus, the responsibility of maintaining uptime locally falls on Cloudhopper.

Android handsets have been coming out from the various mobile manufacturers stable at a brisk pace. The development of Android OS has also been pretty good. The OS has been gaining market share by leaps and bounds. Currently, the latest version of the Android OS is 2.1. Reports suggest that Android 2.2 will soon be announced. The Android v2.2 is named Froyo. The new version of the Google OS will come with some major changes under the hood.

The most important change in Android 2.2 is the JIT compiler. The JIT compiler translates the application written in JAVA to native code. This leads to significantly better performance, richer graphics and better battery life. There is also Flash 10.1 support in the latest version of the OS. The new version of Android OS is also expected to enable Wi-Fi n support in devices which have the required hardware. The Linux kernel of Android will also get an update from 2.6.29 to 2.6.32. This will lead to additional free RAM on the various Android devices.

It is expected that that the latest version of the Android OS will be announced on May 19th, during the Google’s I/O event.

HTC has recently walked out of the Palm deal as a potential buyer after reviewing Palm’s position. HTC, which is the world’s #5 smartphone manufacturer is officially out of the picture now.

An inside source made a statement at Reuters saying,

There just weren’t enough synergies to take the deal forward.

Another company Huawei, a leader in wireless technologies also declined to place a bid for Palm. This has left out Lenovo as the only potential buyer.

In the meanwhile, this news is already taking Lenovo stocks to a 23 month high. Given that Palm can fetch Lenovo a 1.3 billion, which is 54% of current Lenovo cash stash, this deal looks profitable and optimal for Lenovo.

Even after these leaks, representatives from HTC and Lenovo have declined to comment on this matter.

On the other hand, Palm has claimed that it can survive without selling itself. Jon Rubinstein, the chief executive of Palm hopes that other handset manufacturers use its operating system. This can boost the company’s revenue and keep it in business. He has also made a statement claiming its survival saying,

I believe Palm can survive as an independent company. We have a plan that gets us to profitability.

Palm has also revealed that it has not yet made any final decisions on selling itself off. It seems like Palm sure has a plan. Though, the latest on its to-do list is appointing banking advisors to analyze this situation.

In case you are not aware, Windows 7 has inbuilt support for multi-touch. Of course, you will need to have a touch sensitive monitor for this to work. Although adoption of touchscreen monitors has been slow, manufacturers are slowly warming up to the idea. Major manufacturers like Dell, Asus, Fujitsu, HP and Lenovo have already jumped on the bandwagon. In spite of this, awareness about Windows 7’s touch abilities is still fairly low. Perhaps to remedy this, Microsoft has released Touch Pack for Windows 7.

Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 is a collection of utilities and games, which makes use of Windows 7’s multi-touch capabilities. The applications included in the Touch Pack are:

Microsoft Blackboard: An intricate game of physics in which you solve a puzzle by creating a fanciful machine on a blackboard.

Microsoft Garden Pond: A tranquil game that takes place in serene Japanese water gardens.

Microsoft Rebound: A game in which you use your fingertips to control Tesla spheres with an electrical field between them to catapult a metal game ball into your opponent’s goal.

Microsoft Surface Globe: A program that you can use to explore the earth as a flat 2-D map or as an immersive 3-D experience.

Microsoft Surface Collage: A program that you can use to explore and interact with your photos and arrange them as a desktop background.

Microsoft Surface Lagoon: A screen saver and interactive water simulation, complete with a meditative rock arrangement and playful, shy fish.

Opera Mini 5 is a great little mobile browser. It may not have pinch and zoom or AJAX support, but it more than makes up for these shortcomings through its breezy page loading and unique feature list. Unfortunately, Opera Mini doesn’t allow you to set it as the default system browser. As a result, all links are opened using the in-built browser, instead of Opera Mini.

FourSquare is probably the hottest web property in town right now. We already knew that Yahoo! is probably trying to buy out FourSquare, but it seems like Microsoft and Facebook have joined the bandwagon too. The valuation FourSquare is getting right now seems to be north of $100 Million.

One should keep in mind though that besides these acquisition and partnership offers, FourSquare still has lots of VCs eager to pour money in. What will Dennis Crowley, the founder of FourSqaure, decide? He has already sold one of his startups , Dodgeball, to Google before and that wasn’t the best decision of his life.

Techcrunch is also reporting that Facebook may be more interested in a strategic partnership instead of an outright acquisition. This will serve Facebook well in complementing its own , location based service, which is talk of the town since last few weeks. Do you think Dennis Crowley should sell FourSquare or just trust its growth rate and wait for a bigger and better opportunity?

Ubuntu 10.04 RC was released yesterday and is available for download at the official Ubuntu release page. Head over to this page, navigate to the bottom and there, you will see a number of releases for you to choose from.

If you are interested in the DVD and the source CD, visit this page instead. This includes most common Ubuntu custom distros featuring different desktop environments.

Please do not put the entire load on the main servers and user the download mirrors if possible. The list of download mirrors is also available. A common system requirement is 256 MB of RAM. If you own a newer Intel processor powered Mac system, good news is that you can install Ubuntu on it as well.

This page includes the server, netbook, alternative and the very common desktop version. The desktop version is also a Live CD so you can give Ubuntu a try and decide on whether to install the final version or not. This will not alter your current installations in any way.

A great software to consider when installing Ubuntu with Windows is Wubi. If you want to try Ubuntu inside Windows, go for Windows Ubuntu Installer Wubi. It makes Ubuntu easy to install and does not make any major changes in the boot-loader.

My suggestion is that, with the final version only a few days away, you should wait for the final version though surely, give this RC a try.

A recent build of the Chromium web browser is displaying web addresses differently now. This has raised a some concerns, since Chromium is the basis for Google’s Chrome web browser and millions of users may be affected.